


Claudia and the Art Assignment of Doom

by zarabithia



Category: Baby-Sitters Club - Ann M. Martin
Genre: F/F, Future Fic, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-24
Updated: 2008-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia's art assignment leads to a realization about Kristy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Claudia and the Art Assignment of Doom

**Author's Note:**

> I must thank Cero_ate once again, for listening to me complain about my inability to write drabbles.
> 
> Written for k8

 

 

Claudia traditionally had a pretty high view of her own art abilities. She didn't consider herself conceited at all, but she did realize that art was the one thing she was very good at. This belief in her own abilities wavered somewhat, however, with a solitary art assignment in the fall of her sophomore year in high school.

_Choose a familiar object and depict it in an unfamiliar light._

Claudia complained about the art project for eight long weeks. To her family, to her friends, and even to a few people she considered enemies. 

The project, Claudia's entirely unsympathetic art teacher explained, was _supposed_ to be difficult. It was supposed to be a way to expand and stretch her art skills. It was supposed to make her a better artist.

The only one of those goals the project actually succeeded in, as far as Claudia could tell, was being difficult. It wasn't making her expand or making her a better artist. 

It _was_ driving her crazy, though.

Particularly by the end of week eight. With only six more days left until the due date of the project, Claudia had tried painting virtually every item in her home. Her phone, the television, the pile of dirty clothes that sat at the back of her closet, the art supplies strewn across the room...even the stashed bags of candy were subjected to Claudia's desperate attempts to complete the assignment.

It was in the middle of trying to find a hidden light to a Bite-Sized Snickers that Claudia squeezed a little too hard on her bottle of brown paint, resulting in a gigantic mess all over her favorite painting shirt, face, and arms.

She was in the middle of trying to scrub the paint off her face and arms when her mother called up to her that Kristy had arrived. 

"Send her on up!" Claudia yelled back down the stairs. 

Kristy made her way to the bathroom, her tennis shoes making a steadier thump up the carpeted steps than Claudia's sandals did. Leaning against the open door of the bathroom, Kristy arched an eyebrow and pressed her lips together into a gesture that told clearly that she was trying hard not to laugh.

"It's not funny, Kristy." Claudia poured more soap onto her her wrists and scrubbed extra hard, until she could see faint lines of red around the brown paint.

But the brown paint was still _there_ , which told Claudia that she was fighting a losing battle. 

"Still working on the project?" Kristy asked, wisely choosing not to argue that she'd been intending to laugh.

"Snickers bar," Claudia explained. 

"I see." Kristy made her way over to the sink, and with the same bossiness that she had always possessed, took Claudia's arms in her hands and removed the wash cloth. "Let me," she ordered.

"Yes, Queen Kristy," Claudia retorted.

As was typical, Kristy ignored her in favor of the task at hand. Still, Kristy had grown polite enough over the years to learn how to offer some pretense of pretending to listen to others while in boss mode. "Tell me what you've tried besides junk food for your project. Maybe we can figure out something together." 

Claudia would have been aggravated, because it wasn't as though she hadn't tried hard to come up with something herself. Kristy's presumptuousness under normal circumstances would have been annoying.

But Kristy was doing such a great job at removing the paint - far better than Claudia had been- that Claudia found she couldn't really be annoyed. "I tried everything!" she complained, before launching into a list. 

It was mid-way through that list that Claudia turned her attention back to Kristy, instead of on the paint miraculously coming off her arm. 

It might have been the angle of Kristy's head tilt as she listened, it might have been the light playing funny trick's off Kristy's hair, or it might have been Claudia's own tiredness at having worked three days without sleep on the paint project. But whatever it was, when Claudia took a good look of her familiar friend's face, she saw a look that she hadn't ever seen on Kristy's face before.

It was tender and compassionate - the kind of look Claudia didn't expect to see directed at her from Queen Kristy. 

Had Claudia ever been ruled by logic, she might have stopped to give that look the kind of consideration it deserved. 

But she was an artist, and an artist who just found the subject they'd been searching eight weeks for had very little desire to stop and ponder _why_ that subject had been dropped into her lap. 

All Claudia wanted to do at that moment was paint. Dragging her model into her room, Claudia proceeded to do just that.

~~~~

It was later, during Summer Break, when Claudia had time to lie on her bed, Nancy Drew folded out across her chest, and consider what Kristy Thomas in a different light meant, exactly.

On one hand, it meant getting an A on a project that she had struggled with for eight weeks. 

On the other, the soft light and warm edges that she'd been inspired to paint around Kristy nagged at Claudia because had she not been in the bathroom with Kristy that day, it wouldn't have seemed right. 

Kristy wasn't warm. She certainly wasn't _soft._ She was harsh and abrasive. She was tennis shoes, old faded jeans, t-shirts in the summer and turtle necks in the winter. 

Not that Claudia didn't consider Kristy a good friend, because she obviously did. Kristy, like the clothing item she loved so much was a good friend, in the way that a pair of great fitting tennis shoes would be for gym class. Sturdy, strong, dependable and a great way to get the job done - that's who Kristy was.

The problem was that Claudia hadn't painted Kristy as a pair of tennis shoes - she'd painted her as the thin golden chain that Mimi had left her, the one Claudia considered absolutely essential to all her best ensembles.

Imagining an old pair of tennis shoes as a fine gold chain had helped Claudia on her art assignment. But why she had done so in the first place was a true mystery. Unfortunately, the closest Claudia came to having detective skills was the book sprawled, unread, on her chest. 

~~~~

It hit Claudia during a softball game. A silly softball game for children that Claudia didn't know and hadn't babysat. In fact, Claudia wasn't really sure why she was there at all. 

But she was in the midst of watch little Katy Allan take her best swing towards a ball she hit about as well as Claudia would have, when Claudia realized that she was partially there because seeing Kristy in person was better than staring at the painting of her Claudia had in her room.

It was while watching Kristy that Claudia realized, much to her confusion, that this was doubly true when Kristy exchanged her standard jeans for a pair of mid-length shorts.

Claudia had admired other woman's fashions before, that was true. Many times, in fact, given the love Claudia had for a good fashion sense. It was a love that had grown progressively since Middle School. It was precisely because Claudia had spent so many years critiquing and enjoying fashion that she was able to recognize immediately that was not at all what she doing when she felt herself appreciating Kristy in a pair of shorts. 

The blah beige shorts were, after all, pretty dreadful, even before the addition of the white t-shirt to give it an extra shot of boring. 

But on Kristy, the shorts showed off very toned legs and the shirt that otherwise ached for a dash of color accentuated equally toned legs.

Somewhere between poor little Katy's third failed swing at the bat and the call of "strike," the connection was made in Claudia's mind.

She was more confused than ever.

~~~~

A week later, Claudia was still quite confused. 

Claudia was sitting on her bed, having given up all pretense of being distracted by her old friend Nancy Drew, and was instead staring up at the ceiling. She'd discovered a distinct blotch on the ceiling she had never before noticed and was hoping that would be enough to distract her from the painting of Kristy that Claudia hadn't quite been able to move. Part of Claudia was hoping if she let it sit there long enough the feeling would vanish of its own accord, just as effortlessly and suddenly as it had appeared. 

That, naturally, was when Janine decided to make her presence known. Normally, Claudia would have been happy to see her sister, as homecoming visits were rare now that her sister was working on a Master's degree.

But Claudia wasn't really in the mood to talk to anyone. She was in even less of a mood to be chatty after Janine's greeting. "I haven't seen you moon over anyone like that since that ill-fated Bon Jovi crush in fifth grade." 

"Jon Bon Jovi," Claudia corrected idly. "I didn't have a crush on the entire band, and I don't know what you're talking about." 

Janine made an indignant little snort and pushed Claudia's feet off to the side of the bed so that she had room to sit beside Claudia. "With you, it could have been the whole band. Which is probably making this sexuality crisis all the more difficult for you, I imagine."

Claudia glared pointedly up at her sister. "Put your psychology degree away. There is no sexuality crisis." 

"Of course there isn't." Janine nodded her head with an agreeability that was completely insincere. "Because even you're smart enough to know that you can like girls _and_ boys, right? Thus removing any need for a crisis..."

"Mom and Dad would die," Claudia replied immediately, forgetting that she was supposed to be denying anything.

"They'd adjust." 

"Are we talking about the same people? The ones who still make me hide my junk food in my room so they don't find it?" 

"The same people who know you hide the junk food, that know you're an artist and generally love you for the person you are?" Janine gave her a look that was the pained expression of a genius forced to have a non-genius as a sister. Claudia had received it often over the years. "Besides, Claud, when have what they thought ever stopped you from getting what you want?"

Claudia gave a deep sigh and darted a quick look over at the painting before focusing her glare onto her sister once again. "This is a lot different than hiding a bag of Snickers." 

Janine stood up slowly. "You're right. You were actually willing to stand up for the right to have the Snickers."

Her sister fought entirely too dirty, Claudia thought, throwing a pillow at Janine's retreating back.

She did have a point, though, much as Claudia didn't want to admit it. 

~~~~

Summer vacation traditionally went by entirely too quickly, especially when someone hated school as much as Claudia did. 

But for this summer, once Claudia had made up her mind what she intended to do about her "problem," the days ticked by as slowly as the last few minutes of every math class Claudia had ever had.

They went by even slower, the closer the calendar drew to her birthday.

However, once Kristy actually arrived - early, and the first of the guests, just as she had been for years, and just as Claudia had planned - the minutes went by in what Claudia could only describe as a blur. 

Standing next to Kristy in that fateful bathroom after the kiss was completed, time decided to play another trick on Claudia and reverse gears once _again_ to slow back down to a crawl. Slow enough that all the considerations that Claudia should probably have had beforehand had time to make themselves known. 

What if Kristy didn't return it? What if Kristy didn't like girls? What if Claudia just wasn't her type? 

What if she had just made a huge mistake?

"Um, Kristy? Say something?" _Please_ she didn't add.

Kristy looked at her for several seconds before asking tersely, "Is this a joke?" 

Well, that hadn't been among Claudia's possible scenario of questions. "Um, no. Why would you think that?"

Kristy frowned and pulled back to examine Claudia, as if there was a great idea stirring in Kristy's head that Claudia wasn't quite ready to hear yet. "Did Mary Anne tell you? She promised she wouldn't mention it, but she didn't think it was right not to tell you, either."

"Kristy, I have no idea what you are talking about. But Mary Anne didn't tell me _anything._ "

Kristy's frown deepened, as though her great idea wasn't as great as she had thought, after all. "Then why did you kiss me?" 

"Um, because I wanted to?" Claudia's head hurt, and she tried to figure out exactly what Mary Anne had to do with anything, unless... "Oh! Are you dating Mary Anne?"

"What? No! Mary Anne is my _best_ friend. We're like sisters. I couldn't date her." 

"Then what does she have to do with anything?" 

Kristy sighed and tugged on her ponytail for a second before answering. "I told her a while ago, that I was gay." 

"Oh." Claudia tried not to be hurt that no one had told her. She also tried to resist the urge to ask how long "a while ago" was. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I wasn't sure how you'd react," Kristy answered, with a small smile.

"Well, I hope you know how stupid that sounds now," Claudia retorted.

"A little," Kristy admitted. "But I'm still not sure exactly - "

"You think too much, you know that, right?" 

"Thinking isn't a bad thing, Claud." 

In reply, Claudia kissed her again. 

This time, when she pulled away, Kristy was wearing the same look that had given Claudia an A on her art assignment. Funny how a look that had thrown Claudia for such a loop all summer could put her at such ease in the long run. 

"Friends are arriving," Kristy told her as Claudia thought about another kiss. "We should probably join them. They do come bearing presents."

"I already got the present I was hoping for," Claudia told her. "And they can wait."

Kristy didn't say anything, and she didn't need to. The long, slow, deliberate kiss she gave Claudia was answer enough. 

 


End file.
